I think of you
My heart clenches
In the carousel of seconds it takes to form a moment, yet I managed to witness a lifetime
How did you come to be
A vowel, a constellation, a rhyme in my mind
Days are bare, unpainted walls
Thinking of you I find color
Music
Can’t imagine a world with only one of you in it
I want to breathe you in
Molecules and seconds
Making up days spent together, pieces of paper forming a page
Marbles inside the other
Flowers retaining pigment as they dry
Death and life, striding side by side
Dancing beneath raw bulb, open sky
The pulse in your throat the clench of your thigh
Sweetness in a certain, slow agony
Instrument run over temperate string
The cry of unseen things in the dark
Listen, listen, closer, I bend my head
You tell me everything in one pearlized glance
If there were a creature able to step from shell, made flesh
I think she’d be you, you with your untouchable countenance
The regal surity of your long sloping neckline
How cheek bones become canvas, become art, become song
Your thin chest against mine, just once, like a film played forward and backwards
I see the embrace, an ackwardness, then I’m wearing my best dress, nearly spent, bare feet on dirty street roads, because I wore heals to look like your fantasy and one broke clean in half
You can take things like that as omens
I’ll continue to believe where there are feelings, there are destinations
Electricity above us in the heavens, sprung to earth
Lines in sand, in skin, in the consoling sky at night
Across your sleeping skin, when I want you to dream like I
Building on fantasy, stories come fully real
Only in others lives it seems, you swim ever further away
Until a shadow, a mirage, just the sound of your escape
Sometimes you strangle the moment, with accident or heavy hand
Intensity not meant for now, should take its time to build
I gave you no time, in my world you had long been its center
A flower within flowers, mandala tattooed on the small of my back in purple, calling
I think of you
My heart clenches
In the carousel of seconds it takes to form a moment, yet I managed to witness a lifetime
Before the end there was a beginning, unsung, untested, disused, sythed baren
Leaving nothing in its scatter but wistfulness
Like a memory without basis, not existing, just as real
The feel of your reddened lips, goodbye, never touched, still here
In the unfolding of time, you flicker closer, then far, then in, then
Out
Like an Opal on my finger
Luminous, unforgettable, the night air charged with its curse.